How a Chinese horse became the genetic bridge that brought American horses to Europe
Did horses reach Europe through China? New fossil DNA study says yes (Representational Image) The Dalian horse A 50,000-year journey Why the Dalian horse vanished
Did horses reach Europe through China? New fossil DNA study says yes (Representational Image) The Dalian horse A 50,000-year journey Why the Dalian horse vanished A new fossil DNA study has rewritten the evolutionary history of the horse, showing that the extinct Dalian horse from northeastern China served as a genetic bridge between North America and Eurasia.For decades, the conventional narrative held that horses were a European import to the Americas, brought by Spanish conquistadors who stunned Native Americans with a creature they had never seen. But the latest genomic research turns that story on its head.Horses actually originated in North America millions of years ago, and they only reached Europe thanks to a surprising genetic middleman in China.The Dalian horse, once considered a local oddity confined to northeastern China, carried a distinctive American ancestry that it passed on to ancient horse populations in Siberia, according to researchers from the State Key Laboratory of Geomicrobiology and Environmental Changes.That gene flow means the bloodlines that later gave rise to modern European horses acquired their American roots via this Chinese crossroads."Dalian horses likely served as one route through which North American-related genetic ancestry entered Northeast Eurasian horse populations," the researchers wrote in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.Equids originated in North America during the early Eocene.The genus Equus, which first emerged around 4 to 5 million years ago, is the only surviving lineage, encompassing all modern horses, asses and zebras.According to fossil records, Equus dispersed from North America into Eurasia via the Bering Land Bridge about 2.6 million years ago, and then underwent extensive evolutionary diversification.A 2025 study had already established that ancient horses repeatedly migrated between North America and Eurasia during the late Pleistocene era when sea levels dropped and a land bridge connected the two continents.The new study analysed 20 Dalian horse samples from the late Pleistocene, mostly unearthed from Qinggang county in Heilongjiang province and Harbin.
Researchers recovered complete mitochondrial genomes and identified a "distinctive component" of Eastern Beringian ancestry, essentially American DNA, that was absent from other northeast Asian equids.The researchers suggested that gene flow across the Bering Land Bridge continued until after 50,000 years ago, though it was "intermittent and geographically limited."First identified from fossils in the Gulongshan Cave in Dalian, the Dalian horse was believed to be confined to northeastern China during the late Pleistocene. The new study extends its
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